We’d like to think that every week is Customer Service Week for our company.  But it is great to have that special annual reminder to take time to focus and recognize customers, employees and partners alike. 

In fact, it got me to thinking about the roots of our company’s customer-centric approach to the market (again).  After over 40 years of working with customers -- a large chunk as a manager of operations and project implementation -- one of the most important lessons learned was how critical our vendors were to helping manage technical, schedule, and financial risk.  Completing projects on time and within budget is challenging work.  The challenge is increased when projects involve the integration of multiple vendor products and activities. 

Today’s communications infrastructures have become a complex combination of hardware, software, and networking.  The last thing a Project Manager or Customer Service Manager needs is a vendor that does not understand the complexity of the infrastructure and the necessity to be flexible and responsive to the risks that can be anticipated, much less the unknown risk that surface when everything has to work together the first time.

As a testing services provider we have learned that our value is adapting our best practices to each unique set of customer requirements.  This accomplishes three key objectives for our customers.

• Testing and monitoring planned with emphasis on the high risk areas of a project.
• Testing tailored to the specific phases and technology being deployed on the project.
• Testing budgeted for, scheduled and implemented so that the use of testing time and resources are used in the most cost effective way.

For us providing the best customer service means being flexible and responsive to each customer’s unique requirements and making adjustments during a project in a way that does not penalize the customers for having issues that even the best project manager may not have expected.   

In a real sense, our approach to customer service is grounded in a sincere respect and concern for the project managers and customer service managers of the world.  What’s at the root of your customer service strategy?

Jim Jenkins